Palloni Receives Robert Wood Johnson Award

IPR/C2S social demographer Alberto Palloni has received the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Investigator Award in Health Policy Research. The award, which aims to influence health policy on a national level, will fund a two-year study in early childhood health effects on adult socioeconomic (SES) status and adult health outcomes.

"Are higher income, wealth, education, and occupation protective of health? Are social strata endowed with certain health characteristics? Or could it be possible that individuals who are predisposed to poor health early on are also less likely to acquire the skills to climb the social ladder and are more likely to be affected by the earlier onset of ill health?" asked Palloni.

In exploring the consequences of early health, Palloni hopes to uncover the reasons behind the reproduction of socioeconomic inequality across generations and the persistence of socioeconomic health and mortality disparity across the life course.  "These pervasive trends have long been explored as separate problems," said Palloni, "but childhood health affects them both."

Working with Carolina Milesi of the University of Chicago and Robert White of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Palloni will document the impact of early health conditions on adult SES and health outcomes and attempt to identify the main pathways through which early health influences adult SES and health. He and his colleagues hypothesize that early health's long-term impact depends, in part, on different cognitive and non-cognitive skills acquired in childhood and adolescence.

The study will use multiple longitudinal data sets—five from the United States and two from the United Kingdom. Through the use of structural equation modeling and other statistical methods, Palloni will attempt to mimic the trajectory of individuals’ lives under different population distributions.  "If our predictions are borne out, we will make a strong case for focusing on early health both in terms of research and policy," Palloni said.

Palloni is Board of Trustees Professor in Sociology and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.